The History of Islam In Europe

Europe and the realm of Islam have had close relations with each other for centuries. First, the state of Andalusia (756-1492) on the Iberian Peninsula, and later the Crusades (1095-1291) and the Ottoman capture of the Balkans (1389), brought about a constant interrelation between the two societies. Many historians and sociologists assert today that Islam was the leading cause of Europe's movement from the darkness of its Middle Ages to the brilliance of its Renaissance. At a time when Europe was backward in medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and many other fields, Muslims possessed a vast treasure of knowledge and great possibilities of development. 

The first event that made Europeans aware of Islam's coming important place in their lives was the caliph 'Umar ibn al-Khattab's capture of Jerusalem (638). This caused Europe to realize for the first time that Islam was spreading and approaching its own borders. The main reason for the Crusades, launched four centuries later, was to take Jerusalem back from the Muslims. But the Crusaders who set out for this purpose gained something else, for the contact they made with the Muslim world was the first step toward Europe's rebirth. Dominated by darkness, conflict, war, and despotism, Europe encountered the Islamic world's advanced civilization and saw that its inhabitants were both highly prosperous and civilized, as well as quite advanced in the fields of medicine, astronomy, and mathematics as in their social lives. They also saw that values rarely found in Europe at that time (e.g., pluralism, tolerance, understanding, compassion, and self-sacrifice) were aspects of the high morality expressed by Muslims, who were aware of their religious responsibilities.

A painting named "Sunset in Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives.Jerusalem, when it entered the Islamic fold during the reign of 'Umar ibn al-Kattab, enjoyed a brand new period of peace and tolerance. The Islamic morality formed the basis of this exemplary environment. "Those who, if We establish them firmly on the earth, will establish salat and pay alms, and command what is right and forbid what is wrong. The end result of all affairs is with God.(Qur'an 22:41) Our Word was given before to Our slaves, the Messengers, that they would certainly be helped. It is Our army which will be victorious.(Qur'an, 37: 171-173)

Meanwhile, as the Crusades continued, European societies also had relations with a Muslim society much closer to home: the Muslim kingdom of Andalusia, located in the southern part of their own continent. Andalusia had a great cultural influence upon Europe until its demise in the late fifteenth century. Many historians who have studied Andalusia's influence upon Europe agree that this kingdom, with its social structure and high level of civilization, was far more advanced than the rest of Europe, and that it was one of the principle factors in the development of European civilization. The prominent Spanish historian Blanco Ibañez writes that:

Spain's famous Cordoba Mosque, built during 784-86. Rather We hurl the truth against falsehood and it cuts right through it and it vanishes clean away! Woe without end for you for what you portray! (Qur'an 21:18)

Defeat in Spain did not come from the north; the Muslim conquerors came from the south. This was much more than a victory, it was a leap of civilization. Because of this, the richest and most brilliant civilization known in Europe was born and flourished throughout the Middle Ages between the 8th and the 15th centuries. During this period northern peoples were shattered by religious wars, and while they moved about in bloodthirsty hoards, the population of Andalusia surpassed 30 million. In this number, which was high for the time, every race and religion moved freely and with equality, and the pulse of society was very lively.

Interior view of one of the towers of Andalusia's famous Alhambra Palace. We appointed leaders from among them, guiding by Our command when they were steadfast and when they had certainty about Our Signs.(Qur'an. 32:24)

With its well-illuminated streets, the capital Cordoba provided a striking contrast to the European cities and according to the English historian John W. Draper, "Seven hundred years after this time, there was not so much as one public lamp in London. In Paris, centuries later, whoever stepped over his threshold on a rainy day stepped up to his ankles in mud."

Andalusia finally ceased to exist in 1492 with the fall of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula. But now, Europeans came face to face with the Ottoman Empire, which was beginning to advance in the Balkans during the fifteenth century as a result of several victories and mass conversions among the Balkan people. This conversion was never forced or obtained by pressure. In time, the Islamic morality put in place by the Ottomans brought those who witnessed it to choose Islam freely. Ottoman civilization, built on the Qur'anic moral values of justice, equality, tolerance, and compassion, remained in the Balkans for 400 years, and its traces can still be seen there. (A large number of these remains were destroyed by Serbian troops and missiles during the war in Bosnia, but this does not change the facts of history.) This Qur'anic-based civilization made Islam an important part of Europe. Even today, quite a large number of European Muslims live in the Balkans.

One person who believes that European civilization has learned much from Islam and that the two civilizations have always been intimately connected is Charles, Prince of Wales. Prince Charles describes Islamic civilization and what Andalusia and the Ottoman experience in the Balkans has taught Europe:

Diplomacy, free trade, open borders, the techniques of academic research, of anthropology, etiquette, fashion, alternative medicine, hospitals, all came from this great city of cities. Mediaeval Islam was a religion of remarkable tolerance for its time, allowing Jews and Christians to practice their inherited beliefs, and setting an example which was not, unfortunately, copied for many centuries in the West. The surprise, ladies and gentlemen, is the extent to which Islam has been a part of Europe for so long, first in Spain, then in the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed so much towards the civilization which we all too often think of, wrongly, as entirely Western. Islam is part of our past and present, in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to create modern Europe. It is part of our own inheritance, not a thing apart.

The Swedish ambassador Ingmar Karlsson, known in Turkey for his book Islam and Europe, says that in the Andalusian period, Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived together in peace and that this should be taken as a model in Europe.

High representative for the International Community in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Wolfgang Petritsch, stresses in an article in the November 20, 2001 edition of the New York Times that the struggle against terror must not be directed against Islam and that it must never be forgotten that Islam is actually a part of Europe. In his article, "Islam is Part of the West, Too," he states: "When we step beyond the us-and-them paradigm, we might remember that Islam is part of the European tradition." Keeping this historical fact in mind is one way to prevent the chaos desired by those provocateurs who put forward the "clash of civilizations" thesis. Differences in civilization are not reasons for conflict; rather, they can be an important means of advancing dialogue.

[Source : riseofislam.com]

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Clooney: Obama ‘having an almost impossible time governing’

 “The Ides of March” director, writer and actor George Clooney (second from left) arrives in Venice on Tuesday with co-writer Grant Heslov (left). The political drama, which also stars Ryan Gosling, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei, opened the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday.

VENICE, Italy — Idealism loses out to cynicism in George Clooney’s political drama “The Ides of March,” which opened the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday.

Mr. Clooney directed, wrote and acted in the political drama that features Ryan Gosling as a gung-ho press secretary swept into a sex scandal in the final days of a Democratic presidential primary in Ohio. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti are rival campaign managers who use loyalty as a weapon in their epic battle for victory.

Marisa Tomei plays a New York Times reporter angling for scoops on the campaign trail. And Evan Rachel Wood, a pretty campaign volunteer eager to play in the big leagues, is yet another figure giving female political interns a bad rap.

Mr. Clooney’s idealistic presidential candidate, Pennsylvania Gov. Mike Morris, has a straightforward platform: He’s nonreligious but defends the freedom of religion. He also opposes the death penalty and wants to phase out internal combustion engines to reduce American dependence on foreign oil.
Mr. Clooney plays the presidential candidate but told reporters at the festival he is not looking to be one in real life.

“As for running for president, look, there’s a guy in office right now who is smarter than almost anyone you know, who’s nicer and who has more compassion than almost anyone you know. And he’s having an almost impossible time governing. Why would anybody volunteer for that job?” Mr. Clooney told a news conference.

“I have a really good job. I get to hang out with very seductive people. So I have no interest.”
For Mr. Clooney, the film wasn’t so much a political movie as a morality tale, exploring the question of whether the ends justify the means. The political arena “raised the stakes,” a relaxed and jocular Clooney said, but the questions the film poses reside in many areas of life.

“You could literally put this in Wall Street, or you could put it pretty much anywhere,” Mr. Clooney said. “It’s all the same sort of issues. It’s issues of morality. It’s issues of whether or not you are willing to trade your soul for an outcome.”
In the film, many characters use seduction to get what they want: to get closer to power, to undermine the other campaign, to win political backing.

Mr. Giamatti called his character “an unabashedly seductive guy.” His play to recruit Mr. Gosling’s character to the rival campaign opens the film’s exploration of loyalty and friendship in politics.
“My character is all about seduction … the whole game of politics is a kind of sexy game in America, and I think [the movie] portrays it really well,” Mr. Giamatt said.

And while Mr. Clooney and his fellow actors are willing to concede that Washington and Hollywood may share seduction and power as common currency, that doesn’t mean the stakes are the same. Hollywood, they suggested, commands a disproportionate amount of popular attention.
“I do think there is a huge difference between Hollywood and Washington and what we are responsible for and what influence we wield,” Mr. Hoffman said. “I think sometimes it gets forgotten, that the people who are governing us have a much more important position.”

The film’s title — “The Ides of March” — highlights its undercurrent of betrayal. In Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar,” a soothsayer warns the leader of imminent betrayal with the line “beware the ides of March.”

[Source : washingtontimes.com]

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Good Reads: Qaddafi's African mercenaries, Tripoli's water, and Mexican gangs

 

Good journalism is dead. We know this because good journalists tell us this every day, in well-written, well-researched, logical, persuasive stories about the dying news industry. We trust these articles, because they are published by reputable news organizations that still care about things like fact-checking and penetrating questions and deep analysis.

All of which proves that good journalism is not, in fact, dead. (Terribly undervalued, maybe.… Not that I’m complaining.)

Today’s collection of Good Reads is a reminder that good journalism goes beyond mere information – that pesky little crawl of type at the bottom of the TV screen – into a satisfying exploration of an issue that gives readers a new way to think about issues that affect their lives.

Timbuktu and mercenaries

In the fabled city of Timbuktu (see map), where the deserts of the Sahara meet up with the mighty Niger River, The Atlantic’s reporter on the ground, Peter Gwin, meets up with Tuareg mercenaries who fought to defend ousted Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Qaddafi from his own people.

Mr. Qaddafi’s use of mercenaries from all over Africa was so common that when citizens see people with darker skin than theirs, they assume that person is a mercenary and promptly hand that person over to the authorities, or, more horribly, settle the matter violently themselves.

In the Atlantic piece, Mr. Gwin describes an interview with a Tuareg fighter, given the pseudonym Abdullah, recently returned from Libya. His unit in Tripoli was told to disperse anti-Qaddafi demonstrators.

“That was easy,” he said with startling nonchalance. "We would kill three or four in the front of the crowd and they all ran away."

And when Qaddafi said in February that his fighters would hunt for protesters house by house, Abdullah and his men took the Libyan leader at his word. "To be honest, it is true. We believed what Qaddafi told us. We believed we would go there and kill everyone."

Fight for water

Libyan news continues to dominate headlines, and in the Monitor’s Backchannels blog yesterday, Dan Murphy reported that the anti-Qaddafi forces have rejected a United Nations proposal to send in peacekeepers. The rebels say they are not in a civil war, but rather in a fight to defend themselves against the forces of a dictator. Now on the outskirts of Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte, the rebels have given the city an ultimatum to surrender by this weekend. If not, the rebels say they will take the city by force.

[Source : csmonitor.com]

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As hurricane Katia picks up steam, potential tropical storm forming in Gulf

Hurricane forecasters now have two storms to watch: Hurricane Katia could be on its way to becoming a category 3 storm, while a storm system in the Gulf could organize into tropical storm Lee within 48 hours. 

Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center are moving into juggle mode as they track hurricane Katia in the Atlantic and a mass of storm clouds in the Gulf of Mexico that stands a 70 percent chance of becoming a tropical cyclone within the next 48 hours.

This new system in the Gulf should encounter conditions Thursday that would strengthen it, forecasters say.

If that happens, the system could become a tropical depression within the next 24 hours, with the name Lee awaiting it if continues to strengthen to topical-storm status within the next two days.

"Interests along the entire northern Gulf of Mexico coast should monitor the progress of his disturbance," forecasters urge.

Meanwhile, Katia – still over the central Atlantic – strengthened overnight from a tropical storm to a category 1 hurricane.
At 5 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time Katia's center was located in the Atlantic about 1,000 miles west of Martinique in the Leeward Islands and roughly 1,700 miles southeast of Bermuda.

It's still too soon to know what threat, if any, the storm poses to the East Coast so soon after Irene.
Katia continues to follow a generally northwest track, one that could put the hurricane about 600 miles south of Bermuda and about 500 miles east of the in the southern Bahamas by early Tuesday morning. That position could vary by up to 225 miles on either side of the forecast track, given the uncertainties inherent in projecting the track that far in advance.

Forecasters say they currently expect Katia to continue to strengthen, becoming a category 3 storm perhaps within the next 48 hours.

Overnight, it appeared that the storm encountered a patch of dry air, a feature forecasters had been watching Wednesday for its impact on Katia. That encounter has disrupted the storm's eye a bit, leading to some uncertainty over whether the changes are temporary or whether they indicate that Katia is as strong as it will get.

For now, forecasters have opted to interpret the changes as temporary.

In Picture : 

[Source : csmonitor.com] 

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Infrastructure bank could be part of jobs package

WASHINGTON (AP) — A national infrastructure bank that would entice private investors into road and rail projects could be a major part of the jobs package that President Barack Obama hopes will finally bring relief to the unemployed.

The White House hasn't divulged the contents of the package that Obama is to unveil in an address to a joint session of Congress next week. But the president has pushed the idea of an infrastructure bank in recent speeches and has praised Senate and House bills that create such a government-sponsored lending institution.

Whether the bank, which would need time to organize, could have any real impact on the jobs situation in the coming year — and particularly before the November 2012 elections — is in dispute.
Obama seems to think it would.
"We've got the potential to create an infrastructure bank that could put construction workers to work right now, rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our vital infrastructure all across the country," he said at a news conference in July.
But Janet Kavinoky, director of infrastructure issues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cautioned that "even in the next two years I don't believe the bank is going to be that kind of job creator."
The best way to spur job growth in the short term is for Congress to pass long-stalled bills to fund aviation and highway programs, she said.
The Chamber of Commerce strongly supports the infrastructure bank. Kavinoky said the United States is one of the few large countries that lack a central source of low-cost financing for construction projects. But she said it's going to take time to get it running and come up with a pipeline of projects where funds can be invested.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who's sponsoring an infrastructure bank bill, argued that "we have projects all across America that are ready to go tomorrow." He said the bank "could have money flowing in the next year easily."
Michael Likosky, senior fellow at the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge and author of "Obama's Bank: Financing a Durable New Deal," says he is working with transportation agencies in California and New York that "are waiting for the federal government to say they are going to support these projects."
A commitment to a national infrastructure bank could also provide a positive spark to financial markets and encourage investment, he said.
The bank would supplement federal spending on infrastructure by promoting private-sector investment in projects of national or regional significance. The private sector currently provides only about 6 percent of infrastructure spending.
Supporters, which range from the Chamber of Commerce to the AFL-CIO, say pension funds, private equity funds and sovereign wealth funds have hundreds of billions of dollars ready to be invested in low-risk infrastructure projects.
It's better than having pension fund money go to Treasury bonds, Likosky said. "It's really about changing our approach; we're in tough economic times and we will be for a while. We have to make sure the money we have goes further."
The Kerry bill would require $10 billion in start-up money from the government to get the first loans going and cover administrative costs. The bank would be government owned, run by a board of directors, independent of any federal agency and self-sustaining after the initial expense. Public-private partnerships, corporations and state and local governments would be eligible for the loans.
The bank's directors would pick which projects to finance based on an analysis of costs, benefits and revenue streams, such as from tolls or fees, for repaying the loan. Once the terms of the loan, including interest rates and fees to cover risk, are set, the Treasury Department would disburse the loan.
Urban projects would have to be at least $100 million in size, rural ones $25 million. The infrastructure bank's loan could cover no more than 50 percent of a project's costs.
"There is going to be a revenue stream for payback and therefore the project is going to stand on its own because it will be a good enough project to attract private-sector funding," said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, one of several Republican co-sponsors of the Kerry plan.
Supporters estimate the bank could set up as much as $160 billion in government loans over a decade and anchor as much as $650 billion in projects.
In the House, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., has a similar bill that relies on $25 billion in start-up money and makes use of bonds as well as loans to stimulate construction projects. Both Kerry and DeLauro would cover transportation, water and energy projects.
DeLauro would also include communications projects. She says her bill is modeled after the European Investment Bank, which has been financing infrastructure projects for 50 years and last year invested more than $100 billion.
Obama, in his 2012 budget proposal, envisioned spending $30 billion to start an infrastructure bank within the Transportation Department that would provide grants as well as loans to transportation projects.

That idea drew opposition from the House Transportation Committee chairman, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. He said in a recent article in the congressional newspaper Roll Call that it would be better to increase help for existing state infrastructure banks "rather than increasing the size of the bloated federal bureaucracy, as some advocate, by creating a national infrastructure bank."

Kerry pointed to a 2009 American Society of Civil Engineers report that said $2.2 trillion needs to be spent over five years to bring the nation's roads, bridges and water systems up to an adequate level. He said Congress needs to both pass a new highway bill and agree on alternatives like the bank.

"If we can leverage $650 billion and get money going in the transportation bill, we can begin to nibble away at the problem," Kerry said.

[Source : news.yahoo.com]

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